Video

There's pictures, there's sound and there's moving pictures. Each have a part
to play in the multimedia experience.
Pictures have pretty much standardised on jpg and gif, and most browsers and viewers can handle that.
Sound is mostly wav, au and midi (I use midi for the music on this site).
But video isn't nearly as standardised.

All video is compressed, and ecompressed at run time. The compression/decompression
algorithms are called a "codec", and there are several around. I'll be using the Intel Indeo R3.2
codec, although sometimes I might not be able to convert clips to that.

Each video plays in a window, which might be anything from 120 by 90 pixels (tiny) to 320 by 240
(called quarter-screen, because it fits neatly in a quarter of a 640 by 480 VGA screen).
If it originally was PAL, then it might be 384 by 288. There are a few larger, but this is exceptional.

NTSC (the US and Japanese standard) runs at 30 frames per second; PAL (European standard)
runs at 25 fps. Some of these clips were digitised at 10fps, which means they might not look
smooth. Run times of clips are anything from a few seconds, up to 18 minutes.

MPEG (MPEG) designed by the Motion Pictures Expert Group, and if it's as good
as JPEG then it's the one to use, to get the most video per megabyte of file.
JPG compression is remarkable in the quality you get per kilobyte, so I'd expect
MPEG to be good too. Indications are that you can get twice the video per megabyte compared to Quicktime.
Some systems now come with MPEG capability as standard,
you
have to download a player. If you're really serious, you can buy an MPEG board for a hundred bucks or so. The Matrox cards (which I use)
include MPG in the hardware.

Most videos floating around the internet seem to be AVIs, with MOV
trailing way behind, and MPG coming up fast. I'd strongly advise the serious fan to get all three
players, because I don't think conversion between the formats is going to
be easy, without serious loss of quality.

My advice is to download the video you like the sound of, and then feed it into your video
player.

If you don't already have an MPEG player, there's a few.

ActiveMovie

This comes from Microsoft, is self-installing, the easiest to use, and plays AVI, MOV and MPGs.
You can get it from
Microsoft's web site

Vmpeg

This is also freeware, and lets you move frame by frame, and loop the video (ActiveMovie doesn't).
It only does MPG, and you can get it
from this site

Ladybug

This is shareware, $19.95. You can loop files, play several at once, and you can define a group of files
to be played in succession (the series that I post are good for that). It also does MOV and AVI files.
Download it from
here

Firehand

Another very good viewer is Firehand
with the "Media Xtension". It also plays files in succession like Ladybug
does. It'll cost you $59.90, because you have to get the "Media Xtension"

Net Toob

AVI and MPG editors

To edit video, you really want to be working with AVI. Then you can use Premiere or
Mediastudio. One of those two comes with most video capture cards. If you don't have it already,
then Premiere will cost several hundred dollars, Mediastudio a little bit less.

To edit MPGs, the best thing I've seen is the software that comes with Pinnacle capture hardware.
It works even if you don't use the hardware, so the way to get it, is buy their cheapest hardware.
You can also use it to combine short MPGs into a long one.